 An American Scholar Explains the Roots of, and Outlines the Solutions to the Animosity Towards America Felt Across the Muslim World. According to Cole, the U.S. needs to accept blame for a sort of idleness, the lack of a prompt and effective response to the deterioration of the situation on the ground (Cole reported that Sweden, for example, without having anything to do with the invasion, has already accepted 40,000 Iraqi immigrants.) Cole holds the American corporate media partially responsible for the some of the disinformation that kept the American people from understanding more about the tragedy that was unfolding. “We are not well served by our corporate media. I don’t think the U.S. public was ever aware of what the Iraq war really was for the Iraqi people,” lamented Cole. TV networks in particular had a tendency to sanitize the war, showing images of the craters that would be left by the bombs, but not of the blood and the corpses and the spare limbs that dominated the scene immediately following the explosion. This imagery, instead, made it regularly on outlets such as Al Jazeera. Because of the sanitization of the more gruesome aspects of the war, Cole believes that the human costs of the U.S. military engagement in Iraq were never fully recognized at home. As all of this is on the minds of the Iraqis, and of people across the Muslim world, U.S. military presence in Iraq has, according to Cole, become utterly unacceptable. 
While being extremely critical of the policies of the Bush Administration, Cole also recognized that the situation in Iraq has improved and that U.S. forces exercise today far more command and control then ever before. However, he insisted that the relative stabilization of the country should not be understood as vindicating the invasion. “It would be like saying that, when the black plague began subsiding in medieval Europe, the Norwegian rat had been vindicated,” Cole remarked ironically.
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